Mike Keneally misses his couch

“We’re covering a lot of North America on a two-month tour. I really love traveling, which is a good thing, considering how much of it I’ve been doing lately,” says multi-instrumentalist Mike Keneally, adding, “when I’m not here, I miss my girlfriend, the recording studio where I work, and my couch.”

Currently on the road with Joe Satriani, Keneally released his new CD, You Must Be This Tall, on August 27. His previous record, Wing Beat Fantastic, a collaboration with XTC’s Andy Partridge, is up for a 2013 SDMA award. “The whole songwriting process with Andy is a fond memory — generally, he’d say ‘play a chord’ and I’d play one, then he’d say ‘make the next one a bit higher.’ Together we worked on every note and chord until it passed muster. Andy is not easy to please, so I was grateful that he was so taken with the final product.”

Keneally says You Must Be This Tall is more of an eclectic mix: “Zappa, Mahavishnu, the Beatles, Jeff Beck, Sun Ra, and Jimi Hendrix,” he says, “Plus Miles Davis, John Coltrane, lounge music from the ’50s and ’60s...and a few thousand other things.”